Demystification
The story of the Beatles is well known. Some Liverpool lads form a band; they go to Hamburg, become famous beyond belief- in their own minds "bigger than Jesus Christ". They experiment with pot and LSD, go to India, split up. The sixties are the Beatles. The band represents the rags to riches phenomenon of the 'working class hero' that Lennon took the trouble to parody, whilst their 'Revolver' and 'Sgt Pepper' albums led the way for a musical revolution from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves.
But why do we still care? Next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Beatles' first album, and no doubt there will be some sort of documentary scheduled for the BBC- Paul McCartney is already working on a film project focusing on the Beatles as 'artists'. What more can we possibly need to know about these four happy-go-lucky moptops after the release of the exhaustive 'Anthology' project, in which the three remaining band members told it 'as it really happened'? All are now multi-millionaires, particularly Sir Paul, whose fortune is estimated at £450 million, yet they persevere with their consummate publicity efforts- look at any magazine stand and I bet there will be another Beatles special edition on the shelves.
One might wonder why they feel the need to carry on like this; the public demand could always be satisfied by perfectly capable biographers who could no doubt research their life stories in meticulous detail. But perhaps this is the point. Albert Goldman's biography "The Lives of John Lennon", now strangely out of print, took six years to research and write, yet its findings were so heinous that loyal fans, dismayed that their hero might have been bisexual, anorexic and a wife beater, shouted it down so loud that its portrait of Lennon has come to be ignored. In 1982, Peter Brown broke out of the Beatles' clique to write about their sexual misdemeanours on tour: he, too, was vilified and promptly silenced. So what have Messers McCartney, Harrison and Starkey to hide that they put themselves through the efforts of producing 'official' versions of events one after another? Lennon was certainly always less coy; on Hunter-Davies' biography, the first work of Beatles historiography, he remarked "It was really bullshit, you know...no home truths were written, there was nothing about the orgies, and the shit that happened on tour. I wanted a real book to come out, but we all had wives and didn't want to hurt their feelings".
The fact is that it has been forbidden to portray the Beatles as anything other than the 'fab four'. The fans that screamed and screamed have now grown up and have become our parents, but the Beatles still remain a large part of their teenage memories: once idols, they have become icons to whom any dishonour would be sacrilege. But the truth is that the Beatles were never what they claimed to be. That image was conjured up by their astute manager, Brian Epstein, who brought them from the stinking pit that was the Cavern club to Shea stadium. Perhaps only now we are realising what shits the Beatles really were- stories that women were taken into dressing rooms and virtually raped before they went on stage have been uncovered by Geoffrey Giuliano. Epstein paid one of McCartney's groupies £5000 to keep silent after she became pregnant; only recently has she and her McCartney-lookalike son come forward, demanding blood tests to prove the identity of the father. McCartney continues to refuse them. It may be that Lennon's behaviour eclipses the rest- a man with a ferocious temper, it is likely that he was responsible for his best friend's (Stuart Sutcliffe) death from brain damage two years after he beat him unconscious behind a Liverpool bar, a feat he achieved again at McCartney's 21st birthday party when he hospitalised Bob Wooler after the Cavern DJ implied that he might be homosexual.
It was once said that the Rolling Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs, but the Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen. For some reason we seem perfectly happy to keep up with their respective charades, to the extent that, paridoxically, the Beatles have developed an 'uncool' label amongst those of us who prefer the faster living rock idols such as Hendrix and Morrison. Perhaps we only have to look at the behaviour of Lennon and Ringo in the 1970's to demonstrate how false this picture really is; their coke-fuelled partying put one in rehab, the other in a paranoid state of confusion that left him unable to leave his Dakota flat, under the pretence that he was bringing up a son, who incidentally has confessed that his father used to scream and hit him.
The private lives of the famous should be their private lives, but if Paul, George and Ringo are going to sell their souls for the fans' sake or just for the money then they should at least do it properly. But they simply can't. For behind the public's need to pry is a subtler quest for real insight into a band whose life and work has so intimately impacted our own- they have become an inescapable part of modern culture. This has not been some iconoclastic tirade, but merely an attempt to prevent the other side of the coin from being overlooked; sex, drugs and rock and roll was every a part of their lives. Just don't ever suggest that the Beatles are naff because they were too nice.
8th Jun 2001